I
bought my wife an interesting Christmas present last year. It was
the latest techno-gadget from Amazon called the “Amazon Echo.” In
less than a minute I was able to connect it to my WiFi network which
the Echo uses to play music, provide information, news, sports scores,
weather, and much more. But what’s interesting is how I get it to
do these things. Basically, all I have to do is ask. The
Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear
me from across the room. It responds in a natural voice with
robust sound that supports pretty reasonable music reproduction.
What’s really cool is that it can even understand and respond to
commands while it’s playing music I requested. When I want to
give the Echo an instruction, I just start my request with the word
“Alexa.” The technology that makes this work is called “far field
voice recognition” and it just might be a sleeper technology for
building automation systems.

More Complexity
Intelligent buildings, IoT and LED lighting controls are all moving in
the direction of denser sensor coverage and
ubiquitous networking. At the same time there is a rapidly
increasing body of data to support the idea that the built environment
can have a dramatic impact on the people it’s meant to serve. For
example, Philips SchoolVision
is a dynamic lighting solution for education that has demonstrated
meaningful change in educational outcomes through appropriate teacher
selection of different lighting profiles based on student tasks and
behavior. Other studies have shown that giving patients control
over their environment (including lighting) reduces hospital
stays. Even commercial office space is not immune. Studies
show that employees are more productive overall when they have the
ability to control environmental factors in their work area. So
it seems like a safe bet that building occupants will have more control
options and access to controls for their building.

To APP or not to APP?
The current thinking is that people will access systems that give them
this type of control through apps on their smart phone. And,
maybe they will. But after playing with the Amazon Echo for a few
months I’m not so sure. I used to check the weather in the
morning with an app on my phone. I rarely do that anymore.
It turns out it’s much faster and easier to just say, “Alexa, what will
the weather be like today” and instantly get the day’s weather report
read to me. It leaves my hands free to continue shaving, getting
dressed or whatever else I might want to do. The same is true
with news summaries. I used to take a quick look at CNN and a few
other news sites at the start of the day to get the highlights.
Now I just ask my Echo to read me the highlights from the news feeds I
care about.

Another area where the Echo has changed my user interaction model is
casual music. To play some background music I used to access
Pandora on my phone paired with a Bluetooth speaker on my desk.
There is no need for that anymore. Now I just say. “Alexa, play
80’s music” or “Alexa, play some Beach Boys songs” or “Alexa,
play the ‘Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress’ song” and I get exactly the
music I requested. And, if I want to, I can even configure my
Echo to access my Pandora account to get music from my own Pandora
channels.

Another way I can use the Echo is to ask it to get information for me
rather than firing up a browser and doing a search. Requests
like, “Alexa, how far away is the moon” or “Alexa, who was Magellan” or
“Alexa, what is Moore’s law” instantly get me the information I
want. Again, it’s faster, simpler and more convenient than using
my phone to do the same thing.

The Bottom LineSo,
what does all this mean for building automation? As the
capabilities of intelligent buildings increase, so will the complexity
of the user interaction. Occupants will have more control over
their environment so the need for simple, easy and intuitive
interaction models will be increasingly important. It could just
be that far-field voice recognition will serve occupant needs for
system interaction better than smart phone apps. The same might
be true of building engineers. Building engineers will have to
deal with more complex systems that are linked in various ways with
multiple cloud services. We might find that talking and listening
to a device across the room will prove to be a better interaction model
than touch and tap on smart phone apps.

Smart phones and their associated apps have become a defacto standard
for user interaction with cloud services and through them, to many
devices. It’s hard to remember a past without smart phone apps
(even though they have existed for less than 10 years!). It’s
also incredibly easy to project the future just by extrapolating the
phone app trend. However, my experience with the Amazon Echo has
me wondering if there might be a new trend starting … one that relies
on far-field voice recognition and conversational interaction rather
than the touch and tap we have so rapidly adopted through smart phones.
I asked my Echo about that but the response I got was simply “I can’t
find the answer to the question I heard” … so I guess we’re just going
to have to wait and see what the future brings.

As
always, the views expressed in this column are mine and do not
necessarily reflect the position of BACnet International, ASHRAE, or
any other organization. If you want to send comments to me
directly, feel free to email me at andysview AT arborcoast DOT com.